This adventure starts very soon, on January 1. Below is everything you need to know that wasn’t included in everything I already told you on Friday…… If you specifically want to be a part of the free Beary Colourful BOM, read Friday’s post as well.
My Fellow Colour Challenge Bloggers
Apart from Jen Shaffer of Patterns by Jen, and myself, there are six other quilt bloggers who are committed to making this whole-year blog hop an astounding success. They are:
If in doubt, call us all “Jen” – you will have a nearly 50% chance of being right!!! Lol. As it is, when I tell people my name they sometimes think I said “Jenny”. Dione rhymes with Leonne, but there isn’t a lot of phonetic difference between D and J. And Jeonne sounds wrong, so Jenny it becomes…… In contrast, when I write my name, people read Dion or Diane. So there you have it, an impromptu discussion on why my blog has a random name like “Clever Chameleon”, not something like “Dione Quilts”, You may blame my parents, although Dad squarely blames my Mum. 🙂
Anyway, I digress, and I must get to the best part! Sponsors!
Meet the Sponsors
Jen has done a marvellous job in finding sponsors for this colour challenge. I know for a fact that this challenge blog hop was a fairly last minute idea, but look at this line up of sponsors! Details about which sponsors are sponsoring which months will be forthcoming as they are finalised.
For every month you enter the colour challenge link up at Patterns by Jen, you get an entry for the grand prize. Which is to have your quilt top quilted by Jen of Dizzy Quilter! Not to be confused with Jen of Patterns by Jen……
There are a few conditions, understandably. Your quilt top can be up to 90″ x 90″ (US$202.50 value!), you must provide the backing, 8″ longer than width and length. Batting can be purchased from Jen, for $20, if you like.
Return shipping is included for US residents only. And the quilt will not be trimmed or bound, those services are extra. It is a fantastic prize!
Coming Back to Earth….
Tomorrow we will put aside our Beary Colourful excitement for a bit and have a more traditional Colour Inspiration Tuesday.
Do you remember my Hoya, or Wax Flower? I had a few comments about it seeming so fake. Well, I assure you, not only is it real, but it’s oddity pales into insignificance in light of another Australian flower. The Australian orchid I discovered through our local state Botanic Gardens the other day just cracks me up! But that’s all I’m telling you until tomorrow!
Would you like to keep in touch with Clever Chameleon and the fun quilty ideas I design as well as find all over the internet? You can follow directly for email updates, or through Bloglovin’, Pinterest or FB. All your follow options can be found here. Thanks for your support!
Just this once I am going to be Done. on. Time! Ha! Just to find out what it feels like! Welcome to My One Monthly Goal with Elm Street Quilts
Well, there is really only one thing to say about late November/early December if you have school age kids in Australia!!! But I suggest you plug your ears first! Here it comes…….. “Aaaaaggggghhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!”
Thankfully, I believe the worst of the concerts and end of year break-up parties and special excursions and graduations and farewells and etc. etc are done with, and the end is in sight. School is out for the summer in a week’s time….. which will bring it’s own joys and challenges, but also hopefully, more sewing time. I really, really hope more sewing time. Because there are several projects I want/need to get on top of. Which leads me to…..
My One Monthly Goal for December
On the top of my list to finish for December is my Vanuatu Turtle Quilt. Here’s where we were at on the 24th of November.
Most of a quilt top
And this is where I need to get to by New Year. A completely finished version of this…..
Some background info in case you are new here….
This quilt is my project for the Splash of Color QAL at Busy Hands Quilts. A quilt along that encouraged everyone to choose their own project, as long as it fit the theme of black and white, with colour highlights. Then it was up to us to keep up with a set of deadlines for quilt construction milestones.
Currently the milestone on the table is to have a finished quilt top (flimsy). The whole way along I have been running down to the wire to get each milestone done before Myra’s linky closes. And of course, my current status is no different….. the opportunity to link up a finished quilt top will expire on Monday.
But I am getting there….. yesterday I added the first layer of the turtle appliqué. I was going to sew the appliqué down today but I like to machine appliqué with the batting under it. And the batting I rinsed out last night is not dry this morning…. of course after a record-hot Spring we had showers early this morning………
Anyway, I should be able to get the aqua appliqué layer sewn down tomorrow, and then once the red pieces are ironed on I am calling this flimsy done.
So that just leaves the finish line…… a completed quilt. The linky for finished quilts opens on the 2nd of Jan 2018. Technically I have until until the 15th Jan to be linked up. But, I hereby declare that I intend to have my quilt done by the 31st of December, thereby being ready BEFORE the last linky opens, rather than throwing my URL under the descending roller door of a rapidly expiring linkup, again! Can I do it? With OMG at my back, anything is possible! 🙂
Why such enthusiasm to get the Vanuatu Turtle Quilt done?!
Good question! Well, I need to put this quilt to bed (so to speak) so I can get on with some new exciting projects for 2018. Otherwise I fear it will end up on my UFO pile.
There are two things that I am currently planning for Clever Chameleon next year that are making me really happy just thinking about them. Both are BOM style projects that will be available for you to follow along with if you wish or to go back to over time. I hope at least one might appeal to you.
Exciting Project 1
The first project is a joint BOM quilt with Joy of “Days Filled with Joy”. We are going to be doing a skill-builder quilt. One that focusses heavily on techniques that you can use to texturise or embellish a quilt. We are still finalising the details, but I can tell you it will be a house block quilt and will start a little way into 2018 after all the New Year dust has settled. This one will be very informal and lots of fun. I’ll keep you posted as we get closer to launching.
Exciting Project 2
I am thrilled about my second big project for 2018 because it will complement my weekly colour board posts very nicely! It is the brainchild of Jen from Patterns by Jen, and involves a monthly Color challenge. This one kicks off on the 1st of January 2018, so not long to go now!
Jen is doing a colour challenge BOM quilt project, with free patterns and instructions available to you from her website. She has asked for a small group of quilt bloggers to support her by either making her blocks or something else in her colour of the month. I have opted for the second option and will be doing a Beary Colourful quilt. Twelve appliqué bears in Jen’s 12 colour challenge themes. Oh happy day! This one is making me wriggle with anticipation already!
I will be giving away the instructions for each bear each month on the same schedule as Jen. My aim is to get some of those scraps moving from my sewing room…… want to join in?! I’ll keep you posted on this project as it develops too.
If you would like to keep in touch with Clever Chameleon and the fun quilty ideas I find all over the internet, you can follow directly for email updates, or through Bloglovin’, Pinterest or FB. All your follow options can be found here. Thanks for your support!
From the Sewing Room: Vanuatu Turtle Quilt Progress
At last check-in
Well, it’s been a while since I’ve updated you on the quilt that I am doing for the Splash of Color Quilt Along at Busy Hands Quilts. I have been slightly distracted with the homemade ornament blog hop and a few other small projects. They’ve been lots of fun, but I must admit, it’s really nice to get back to quilt making again.
In a nutshell, my plan is to make a quilt with fabrics predominately from Vanuatu. The intention is that this quilt will be a memento of our family’s visit there earlier this year. It will also double as a TV snuggle rug and protection for the couch from the cat. This is roughly what I’m aiming for:
My Vanuatu Turtle Quilt design for the Black and White and Splash of Color QAL
So, the progress report….
Now I have all the components prepared for my quilt top. I have sewn the centre blocks from my last check-in together.
And I have sewn up four border strips.
It would have been quicker and simpler without the assistance……
You can’t prove anything…..
Now all that remains is to combine these pieces with a red strip border to create the flimsy. And then it will be time to add the appliqué. 🙂
Short and sweet this week!
If it’s part of your heritage, I hope you had a special Thanksgiving. And wishing everyone a great week ahead as we enter Advent. My kids are eagerly anticipating the hanging of the Advent quilt (aka the candy-pockets quilt)! Do you have any Advent or Christmas quilts that will be making their seasonal appearance soon? I’d love to hear from you!
Colour Inspiration Tuesday: From colour scheme to quilt block and beyond!
I love green and purple together. Always have, although I have not really given it any particular thought before. They look so strong and comfortable together, complementing and magnifying each other without competing. And it is a generous, welcoming colour scheme…. in that you can add in other colours without making a hideous mess (usually).
But until recently it flummoxed me why this is so. They are not complementary colours. They are two parts of a triadic colour scheme, the third ingredient of which is orange. But quite honestly, purple and green can sing together without orange. Helen Godden, one of my all time favourite Australian quilt artists, shared a comment on facebook recently that helped make sense of the brilliance of purple and green. She says “It’s a well balanced combo. Both green and purple are blue (primary) based, one has yellow (primary) added and the other has red (primary) added so all bases are covered and it looks visually balanced.” I had never looked at it in this light before. Thanks Helen!
Colour Inspiration Tuesday: Aurora Star
This week I needed to make a once-off 12.5″ pieced quilt block. No further guidelines were given. Which is a much harder task than “make this block”, don’t you think? Anyway, I had no initial ideas beyond wanting to make a scrappy batik block in greens and purples. Thankfully, this past weekend we decorated our Christmas tree (earlier than normal), and that sparked of a whole raft of ideas. And like many of my ideas, the one I settled on came to me via a rather circuitous route.
On top of our tree this year is the paper star that my daughter made in Germany last Christmas. It is green. And her green star somehow reminded me of pictures I’ve seen of the Northern Lights, which are predominately green with purple. There are some amazing pictures of the Aurora Borealis on Unsplash.
Photo by Vincent Guth
While I am not a bucket-list kind of person, the northern aurora is one thing I do want to see one day. I was fortunate enough to see small southern auroras from my home twice when I was a teen and I will never forget them.
Anyway, getting back to the point, I started wondering whether people take pictures of Venus (the Morning Star/Evening Star) with the auroras. And of course they do. One of the photographers I have featured before has even shared one on UnSplash. The amazing Jonatan Pie.
But in the end it was his photo of the aurora at sunset that captured my colour imagination.
So I put all these ideas together and decided to make a simple aurora star block in green and purple with splashes of sunset colours. Here is what I made.
It turns out that I didn’t have as many green batik scraps at hand as I thought. But I am still happy with my pretty little block. Of course now I want to make a whole quilt! hahahaha! But that Vanuatu Turtle quilt is the next thing in line for attention, so I shan’t.
Want to make your own Aurora Star?
Now it turns out that there is truly very little new under the sun. A little digging revealed that Em of Sewing by Moonlight has already shared a very good tutorial on how to construct the block I wanted to make. So I decided not to re-invent the wheel. I can tell you that the template she provides works very well, so if you would like to make this block, I wholeheartedly refer you to her post. About the only change I made was that I did not trim the outside edges of the block until I had it all constructed and blocked it square.
Of course, Em’s reasons for making this block were completely different to mine…. if you place multiples of this block together side by side you get octagons (spider webs) with stars in between. But if I were to make a quilt from today’s aurora star idea I would actually use offset blocks to break up the octagons. Because I would want to emphasise the stars in a sea of aurora colours and swirls. Something like this…..
Or this….
Or maybe with most of the stars darkened out for the sky…… I think this is my favourite so far.
Credit
Today’s photos are from Unsplash.com. Unsplash is a collection of free, high resolution, “do what you want with” photos. Credit is not required, but I’m sure you’d love to know who is being so generous with their talent. Accordingly, the aurora photos that inspired me to make the aurora star block were provided by Jonatan Pie. Be sure to check out his collection of photos on Unsplash.
You can also see Vincent Guth’s photos here. Vincent Guth
I hope you enjoyed today’s Colour Inspiration Tuesday! Let me know if you’ve been lucky enough to see Aurora Borealis! Or share your favourite aurora quilt with me – I know there are quite a few bargello versions out there. You can send pictures via the blue, round email icon at the very very bottom of this page. I always love to hear from my readers!
P.S. If you like vivid colours and free-motion quilting, you are sure to like Helen Godden’s work. If you are not already familiar with this amazing quilt artist, then go check her out. She is my recommendation for the week.
P.P.S. If you would like to use Jonatan’s photos or another Colour Inspiration Tuesday photo for your own projects, you can easily find all the Unsplash photos from Colour Inspiration Tuesday in one place for free in my Colour Inspiration Collection.
Vanuatu Turtle Quilt: Design process, warts and all.
In the last few days I have finally had a chance to get back into the sewing room. And I have to admit it was very therapeutic. I have missed sewing. So has our cat. I swear he is addicted as I am!
My goal this week was to design and sew the blocks for my black, white and red Vanuatu Turtle quilt for the Splash of Color Quilt Along. I started with this basic plan…
And these fabrics…..
If you wish, you can read more about the what and why of my original plans, and see my turtle appliqué pieces all cut, waiting for a quilt top.
So, on Thursday, I started on the quilt top. I looked at my plan. I cut six 6½ squares. And I went off script.
That might be a record, even for me!
Changing my mind….
Firstly, I decided that I wanted to add in a very dark, plain fabric behind the bulk of the turtle appliqué. Plainer than any fabric I have brought home from Vanuatu. I did actually look for a mostly black fabric in Vanuatu, but there wasn’t any to be had.
So, I went hunting among my scraps here at home and found an Australian Aboriginal print in black called Sand Dunes. The Sand Dunes scraps are leftover from the backing of a dear friend’s quilt. It is very soft and colourfast – an amazing piece of fabric to work with. So I added it to the mix. I also found some black 2½” pre-cut strips inherited from another friend. Perfect for extra darkness behind the appliqué.
Dark corner for the turtle appliqué background. Sand Dunes is the black with the dotted wavy lines through it.
Changing my mind, again…
Although I had a 5×5 grid drawn up for my colour gradient in the quick diagram above, I had actually intended to do an 8×8 grid of 6″ squares. Some fussy cut whole squares and some pieced squares to get a black and white gradient. That is why I started by cutting 6½ squares of each Vanuatu fabric.
However, I quickly realised that 6″ squares of pinwheels and HSTs in these prints is going to result in a very. busy. quilt. Which would be fine, except that this was supposed to be the background for my appliquéd turtle. And it was also going to take waaaay too long to construct.
So, I decided that my mockup was trying to tell me something – that I should have 5×5 8″ finished blocks. I cut some new 8½” squares, and recycled the 6½” squares into 8½ squares by adding 2½” strips on two sides. This had the added bonus of being an easy way to graduate through colour values and tie the blocks together visually.
Building up the Vanuatu Turtle Quilt
And again…
As I started on the more intricately pieced blocks, I decided that I needed some more solid or solid-like fabrics. Specifically in the grey range. Somewhere for the eyes to rest from the prints. I had already included a blue-grey hand-dye and a white solid in my original fabric choices. Now I added two grey Shadow Play fabrics from my scraps. I only had enough of the dark grey Shadow Play for 4 pieces. But that is half the fun, making do. 🙂
More progress on the turtle quilt
And again…
At this point it was time for me to head out to the South Australian Quilters’ Guild evening meeting. I’m glad I got this far before I had to go, because I was beginning to heed the little voice that said I needed to add a nearly white fabric. There were no nearly white fabrics in Vanuatu, just as there were no nearly black ones. I had thought that I might get by with fussy cutting. Or using the reverse side of a fabric. But…
At the Guild meetings there is always a shop stall, and in the end I picked up something to round out my fabric choices. Actually I picked up two somethings. One was a white fabric with a fine black print. It had slightly more black than I wanted, but it was the best pick available. I was happy at least that the swirls on the print are consistent with the patterns already in my quilt. 🙂 The second purchase was a fat quarter of a dark blue-grey Grunge that happens to be the exact same colour as the blue grey on two of the Vanuatu fabrics. Score!
Finishing off the design
A little more playing and switching fabrics around and I settled on this layout (with a few more tweaks as I sewed).
Nearly finished. You can probably guess who disturbed my nice tidy layout…..Somebody who thinks he is invisible siiting here…..
And now I have finished sewing up the 8½” blocks for my Vanuatu Turtle quilt. They are ready to be assembled into a quilt top and have borders attached.
Vanuatu Turtle quilt blocks finished and ready for assemblyHappy with my pile of blocks
So, how am I feeling? Well, I really love this quilt top so far. I think the design is actually quite effective as it is. A small part of me even thinks that I should claim the grey-blue as my “Splash of Color” and leave it really simple. Because there is a whisper of a question in my head as to whether it will marry well with my appliqué. Despite all the changes I have made, it is still very busy.
But the whole point of this quilt is the turtle appliqué….. And if I stop now this quilt top will be too small to be particularly useful, and my turtle appliqué will be orphaned. So I will push on. If, in the end, it isn’t as fantastic as I envisioned, then I won’t mind it going on the couch, right?! And there is always something to be learned in quilts that don’t quite make it to awesome. Fingers crossed that I am just over analysing things and it will be just fine!
If you are also participating in the Splash of Color Quilt Along I hope that you are pleased with your progress so far. If you like black and white quilts and haven’t been over and checked out the progress of the other projects yet, be sure to do that. Everyone has chosen their own project, so this QAL is very interesting, even as a spectator sport. 🙂
P.S. Colour Inspiration Tuesday resumes here tomorrow! Yay!
And there is a Grand Prize as well!!
Tomorrow we will put aside our Beary Colourful excitement for a bit and have a more traditional Colour Inspiration Tuesday. 
